Give Plants a Chance

Sugarhouse Community Garden (Salt Lake City, UT)

2011-07-26T16:03:00.000-07:00

A community garden on a tennis court! I love it! This garden was inspired in part by another community garden halfway across the world, in the UK, where another group had built a garden right on top of an old tennis court. (This is the rad thing about the internet!) You can see an homage to their inspiration in their garden sign, which includes photos from the UK gardens.

This is the first neighborhood group that I know of in Salt Lake City to get permission from the City to build a community garden on public land. (The tennis courts had been derelict for years.) It's an exciting development for us!

Beds are built right on top of the asphalt. The gardeners laid down some wood chips in the pathways, to reduce the temperature. A nice thing about leaving some of the pathways bare, though, is that it's easier for people to maneuver around, especially if they are in a wheelchair. Pluses and minuses, I guess.

This is the garden's first growing season, in July. I'm looking forward to seeing how the garden looks by the end of the season. Will the crops have enough root space to grow full size? Will there be enough water?

Another interesting thing about this garden is that they opted not to use drip lines or sprinklers. Basically, the coordinators thought it would be too much maintenance. So everything is hand watered by each gardener.

Salt Lake Community College Community Garden (Salt Lake City, UT)

2010-10-11T17:48:00.001-07:00

Can the word community be repeated any more times? Brit and I stopped by this new garden at the community college today. Isn’t it lovely? The folks in the marketing department have really outdone themselves with the bright sign, visible all the way across the parking lot when you first drive onto campus.

Each raised bed (made from redwood and an incredible potting soil mixture) is tended by a different department or individual. A collective herb area adds pizzazz. Jason is the student who spearheaded the project, and Ann, at the community service center on campus, has spearheaded a series of events at the garden. They’ve brought a gardening workshop and special speaker to the site in its first year.

The goals of the garden are to foster greater sense of community on campus and to educate people about food and agriculture issues. It’s one of a growing number of gardens on college campuses that are sweeping the nation! Here are some more pictures to enjoy. (Can you believe these crops in the middle of October?!?)

Salad Bowl Garden (Davis, CA)

2010-08-14T10:05:00.001-07:00

I posted about this garden a few weeks ago, but I just got some new photos in, and couldn’t resist adding them here. (You may recall the garden looked like this, not too long ago.)

This is a garden started by students a couple years ago, right in the middle of campus at UC Davis. It’s in front of the fancy Plant and Environmental Sciences building. Yep, they just tore up some lawn and planted this biointensive garden full of veggies and flowers!

The idea is that anyone can pick and eat food directly from the garden during lunch breaks, or take extra produce home with them at the end of the day. It’s a demonstration garden, a little oasis on campus, and a gathering place for visitors and volunteers.

Here are some highlights:

Red tomatoes never last long on the vine here. There are lots of green ones, though!

The garden flanks the entrance to the Plant and Environmental Sciences building. Appropriate, right?

Props to the person who can name this Asian green.

I totally love the arching trellis for this cucumber plant. (It’s made out of remesh and some wooden stakes. So easy!)

Labels are everywhere.

We installed a little, mobile fence for the exuberant watermelon patch. Every time I walk past, I fold another escaping vine back into the corral.

Also, check out this news video about the garden’s spring celebration. Margaret Lloyd is the garden’s rockstar coordinator.

Salad Bowl Garden

Heritage Village Community Garden (Atlanta, GA)

2010-08-12T10:45:00.001-07:00

This is the flagship garden for the organization Community Gardens of Henry County. I’ve heard it described as “a real Southern garden.” It’s also geared towards senior gardeners (age 55+), which you can tell by some of the ways they’ve invested in infrastructure.

A corn crib was moved onto the site, creating ambiance and a place to stash supplies. Cement pathways make accessibility easy. (A more permeable surface, like decomposed granite, could be just as accessible and more ecologically friendly. I’m not sure why they opted away from that.)

A newly constructed “outhouse” is actually a nice restroom. We were duly impressed. On-site restrooms are the gold standard for community gardens.

The plots were looking good, especially for an unusually hot, dry growing season. I should also mention that our hosts here were superbly gracious, confirming everything you hear about Southern hospitality.Thanks, ya'll!

Heritage Village Community Garden

American Community Gardening Conference 2010

2010-08-12T09:56:00.001-07:00

I just got back from the annual American Community Gardening Conference, which was held in Atlanta, GA this year!

News to report: I did not melt under the hot, Georgia sun. I met lots of amazing, down-to-earth people building communities and gardens across the country. I visited some bonafide Southern gardens. And, I got completely soaked in a rainstorm at the annual barbeque, but it was totally worth it.

A blues band played on the porch while we ate ribs, corn, and sweet potatoes. yum!

Visiting the Heritage Village Community Garden, one of the Henry Gardens near Atlanta. The building is an old corn crib from the neighboring farm.

Okra!

One of my favorite parts of the conference was the talk by keynote speaker Yvonne Sanders Butler, who started a sugar-free policy at her school in Atlanta, and has become an author and major activist for better nutrition (and physical exercise) in schools. Totally inspiring!

Growing Power (Milwaukee, WI)

2010-07-19T23:35:00.001-07:00

Will Allen at Growing Power has been getting more and more press lately for the work he’s been doing in Milwaukee and Chicago, so it seems timely to share some photos and thoughts from my visit to his farm. Basically, Growing Power is an enterprise that hires local youth (and others) to grow food in the city, bringing fresh, local, organic food to places that need it the most. The organization has been able to do this (and about a billion other things) so well that it’s become something of a gold standard among urban farmers and activists. Here’s how Will Allen puts it:

We share everything we learn, pass it on, and hope they’ll pass it on to others. That’s how change happens, and a revolution comes about. I’m calling it that now, the Good Food revolution, because that’s exactly what it is. (source)

It would be exhausting to describe everything that happens at the one-acre farm, so I’ll just choose a few highlights. Since I’m a garden geek, I’m just gonna focus on the technical stuff, because it doesn’t always get the most press and, honestly, it’s pretty darn cool.

First is the farm’s intensive use of red wiggler worms to produce nutrient-rich compost for the greenhouse and outdoor gardens. These little worms live in numbered bins inside the greenhouse (above) as well as in huge piles that line the outside of the buildings. They eat food scraps that are gathered from around the city in massive quantities (I think this involves full size trucks making deliveries once a week or so). As the worms and natural microbes break down the food scraps, heat is generated, enough even to keep the worms alive and chowing down all through the cold, Wisconsin winter.

Second is the farm’s highly integrated aquaculture system, raising fish and plants in conjunction. (The fish “fertilize” their tank water, which is pumped past filters and growing greens, then back to the tanks.)

Then there are the other farm animals (goats! ducks! turkeys!), not to mention the outdoor hoop houses, the biogas digester, and the electric compost sifter (photos below). Then of course there is all the programmatic stuff that Growing Power does: the farm stand, the apprenticeship program, youth training, workshops, and advocacy .

Frankly, when I met Mr. Allen at the farm, at the end of a long summer day, he seemed a little bit exhausted, and I couldn’t blame him. He wears about a gazillion hats and has the relentless passion of an activist, teacher, inventor, farmer and spokesperson, all rolled into one. I get tired just thinking about it. The result of all this work and care, though, is a beautiful thing. In short, Growing Power and Will Allen deserve the hype. They are totally awesome.

Now for some more photos! Here’s that sweet compost sifter, made from an old dryer:

Using sifted compost to prepare seedling flats:

An old barn sits on the site, a relic of Milwaukee’s agrarian past.

Everywhere you see pots of micro-greens, growing in vermicompost. It’s the farm’s main cash crop.

Here are some of the delivery trucks (for compost scraps?) These guys are not messing around!

Barnyard animals galore:

A hoop house (plastic roof removed for the summer) has been massively loaded with vermicompost. We’re talking two feet of compost here, people! Wowza!

All of this on a single acre!

Growing Power

What is a community garden?

2010-05-27T02:30:00.001-07:00

A place where people come together to grow a garden.

An idea that people, plants, animals and earth are interconnected.

An action that feeds, heals, connects, and celebrates life.

*Credit to Mark Francis, who suggested a three-part definition of gardens.

Slow Food Nation Victory Garden (San Francisco, CA)

2010-05-16T13:36:00.001-07:00

I’m kinda sorry to say that this garden is no longer with us. It was designed as a one-season demonstration project (photo-op?) in front of San Francisco’s city hall, back in 2008. As you can tell, the beds, made from bags of straw, were meant for easy disassembly, and planted with annual vegetables and flowers.
The garden showcased urban, organic food production for Slow Food Nation and Victory Gardens 2008+, plus about a billion other sponsors, government agencies and non-profits that have jumped on the local food bandwagon. (Yeehaw!) Also, veggies were donated to the SF Food Bank.

Kelsey (the on-site coordinator we met there) explained that they really hadn’t been sure how well things would grow in these experimental plots. Fortunately, (with a lot of work by staff and volunteers) it turned out awesome.

Other city and state capitols have been sprouting more permanent gardens. The folks in Vancouver (Why are they always so ahead of the game?) and Maria Shriver in Sacramento are two examples. Growing food in public places has never looked so good!

Slow Food Nation Victory Garden

Growing Home (Chicago, IL)

2010-05-14T21:34:00.001-07:00

Growing Home started out with a simple idea. The director Harry Rhodes described it this way:

We had this idea that getting your hands dirty and seeing something grow could really help change people, but we had no idea how it would work. We saw that people quickly became engaged. They felt like it was theirs: their farm, their chickens, their tomatoes. (source)

This market garden in south Chicago provides job opportunities for people who might otherwise have a hard time finding work or a positive role in society. Here people get to learn about growing food, earn some money, and simultaneously provide a valuable resource (fresh vegetables!) to the greater community.

These greenhouses, on one of Growing Home’s farm sites, are where employees grow peppers, tomatoes, greens, squash and all kinds of other vegetables. Staff member Orrin Williams explained that this project is part of a larger vision for improving life in the community. The food grown here is sold at local markets and partnerships are formed with a growing number of “green collar” businesses bringing jobs and revitalization to the area.

Aside from this garden’s function and purpose, the site has some other interesting aspects. What amazed me the most was the fact that these vegetables are grown in less than 2 feet of soil. Why? Because the entire lot is paved with concrete, and the underlying soil is contaminated with industrial chemicals. So, the garden developers decided to leave the concrete in place (to prevent upward leaching) and simply add a couple feet of fresh soil. It’s incredible that it works, but it does.

In Chicago, so much of the urban soil has been contaminated, that it’s almost a boon to start a garden project with a paved site. That’s a pretty sad statement about the quality of urban soil, but it is impressive to see all the ways that people are managing to work around the challenge.

Growing Home

Green Youth Farm (Chicago, IL)

2010-05-10T15:18:00.001-07:00

Green Youth Farm, run by the Chicago Botanic Gardens, gives teens a summer job growing real food.

Green Youth Farm has a few different sites, but the one I visited is in a lower-income neighborhood, north of Chicago. A select crew of teens hired from local high schools get to learn about farming, running a business, working as a team and leading their peers.

Produce is marketed locally and supplements the program funding. A group of young, full-time staff members also work alongside the participants. They organize the training and keep farm operations going throughout the year.

Visiting in June, I got to see the early stages of the season: tilling the soil, weeding, planting….

The farm also has a bee colony that participants learn how to tend(in full beekeeper regalia).

Overall, I was really impressed by the positive vibe at the farm. People were having a good time, enjoying being outside and working hard together. I could imagine the great experience these young farmers were going to have during the summer, something to be proud of.

Green Youth Farm

Atwood Community Garden (Madison, WI)

2010-05-01T20:10:00.001-07:00

By now we’ve probably all heard about the High Line, a park created on an old, elevated railroad line in New York City. Well, NYC wasn’t the first fancy-pants city to turn a train track into a public park. Welcome to Madison, Wisconsin, ya’ll, innovators of the century.

Here the railroad right-of-way got sliced into three ribbons. On the left you can see the long and skinny community garden (woot!); in the middle runs the bike path (woot!); and on the right you can see a graceful swath of native prairie (woot!).

That’s three levels of awesomeness for the price of one.

At the left-most edge, community garden plots go right up to the street curb. There isn’t a lot of traffic here, so it works out alright.

On the other side of the garden, someone has embraced the spirit of the bicycle. A rim for a trellis. Viva la bicicleta!

And I suppose this mural is celebrating… water? Anyway, it’s nice. They built a series of walls around the garden, just to put up murals. I might also add that this is the view from a lovely little coffee shop overlooking the garden-bike path-prairie.

Oh Madison. You totally rock.

Atwood Community Garden

City Farm (Chicago, IL)

2010-04-28T17:51:00.001-07:00

Check out this totally amazing urban farm in the heart of Chicago. City Farm is actually part of a recycling resource center (offsite). They run at least two farms in the city, selling produce locally and collecting compost materials (plant scraps) from all over the city.

Here are two of the staffers putting up the last letter of their very cool street sign. This site in Cabrini-Green sits on the edge of a historically poverty-stricken part of the city undergoing gentrification. The farm runs a youth training program and serves as a demonstration site.

One of the unbelievable things about City Farm is that they have actually moved this farm –soil and all—at least twice. They just scoop up the soil in dump trucks and haul it to their new site.

Soil is a major issue in Chicago, since most of the land in the city has been contaminated by one thing or another. Rather than building grow boxes to combat the problem, City Farm lays down a layer of clay soil (to adsorb contaminants and keep them from moving upward) then layers their good garden soil on top of that.

I love City Farm, but not in a weird way.

City Farm

Garden for the Environment (San Francisco, CA)

2010-04-26T17:49:00.001-07:00

I’ve been a fan of the work these people do for some time. Even though I haven’t been personally involved (or even living in the same city!) since I found out about them, I got on their email list a few years ago. I actually read their e-newsletters and look at photos from their workshops sometimes. Does that make me an internet garden stalker? Oh well.

So, here are some photos from the time I actually visited in person with a bunch of cool kids from Davis. Garden for the Environment has all these demonstration features, like the raised beds above. (Note how each one is made from different materials!)

Plus this extra tall one that is extra accessible. The bed is pretty shallow, but you could grow some small things in here, like baby salad greens.

I also love recycled objects in community gardens. Here we have a mosaic wall. There are also a few other recycled features that caught my attention. Love the red sink and the leftover tiles used as mulch:

The garden serves as a classroom, demonstration site and general public garden that’s open dawn-to-dusk. As far as I know, they don’t run any plots for rent, but a lot of the work is done by volunteers and interns.

Overall, the place feels like a hybrid between a grassroots project and a botanical garden, just my cup of tea! I would pretty much love to work here some day.

Garden for the Environment

Mill Creek Farm (Philadelphia, PA)

2010-04-14T00:22:00.001-07:00

Like many good things, this urban farm was started by a couple of badass women. Just a few years ago they got permission from the city to build a mini-farm on this vacant lot in West Philadelphia, next to an existing community garden (which is pretty cool).

When I visited in July, they were harvesting like crazy and selling through a farm stand in front of the lot. They were also taking on high school interns and doing all kinds of cool building/art projects on site.

The last photo above is their newly planted green ro of. (That’s sedum, the ever-so-popular plant of choice for green roofs, precisely because it needs almost no water and the thinnest of soil to survive.) Pretty soon, if all goes well, the whole roof will be a carpet of green.

Mill Creek Farm

Alice Fong Yu School Garden (San Francisco, CA)

2010-04-12T20:38:00.001-07:00

What a fabulous little school garden in San Francisco this is. I visited in September, when the apples (for the teachers?) were getting ready for school.

It’s just a little garden on a very steep hillside. The garden designers did some excellent work building terraced raised beds into the hill. I think those poles holding up the sides of the beds might even be the same materials used for playground equipment?

We also got a presentation from the local school garden coordinator. Can you believe that’s really her job? This woman gets paid to go around schools, growing gardens with kids. Talk about a dream job.

Gotta love the little details.

Johnson Community Garden (Sacramento, CA)

2010-04-06T20:25:00.001-07:00

The Johnson Community Garden is the smallest garden run by the City of Sacramento, and also one of the first built by the department of Parks and Recreation.

Smallness has its challenges: few plots, an enormous waiting list, little room for perennial flowers (with their bees and butterflies!), and a higher cost-per-gardener. Still, a small garden is better than no garden, right?

This is also the burliest raised bed I have ever seen!

Urban Farming (Detroit, MI)

2010-04-01T23:45:00.001-07:00

It’s hard to describe Urban Farming in a brief post. The founder, Taja Sevelle, explains it this way:

“We want people to see food growing all over the place, in yards, on rooftops, on walls, anywhere there is space,” she said. The one common denominator with all of the gardens is that they are open to the public. “There are no fences,” she said. “Anyone can take food from the garden.” (source)

I visited Urban Farming a couple summers ago, and only spent an afternoon with some of their staff and volunteers, but what I saw was really cool: open garden patches, where anyone in the neighborhood could stop by and pick some food.

While I was there, one neighbor walked over to help a volunteer crew lay down some plastic mulch, and another neighbor showed up to harvest some greens. The staff said that people generally respect the gardens and appreciate them. The gardens—more like row crops—transform vacant lots into productive land and provide new opportunities for neighbors to get outside and meet one another. Most of all, they make fresh fruits and vegetables more available in places that really need them.

Growing food for public consumption is basically the same idea championed by Darrin Nordahl in his recent book, except that he goes even farther, calling on municipalities (not only donors and volunteers) to help create these kinds of food-producing landscapes, just as they would other services like parks and farmers markets.

Where is this all going to lead? I don’t know, but I’m excited about the work Urban Farming is doing, and appreciate the unique voice they bring to the urban agriculture movement.

Urban Farming

Southside Community Garden (Sacramento, CA)

2010-03-15T20:34:00.001-07:00

So, this is the other 2/3rds of the garden that used to be Mandella Community Garden and got moved down by the freeway. Now it’s called Southside Community Garden (see mural). Probably the crazy/coolest thing about the garden is its rainwater cistern disguised as a giant ladybug!

Gotta love the curvilinear gate, as well. I think that thing rising above the gate is technically called a bower. (I hear the artist was also going to include broccoli and shitake mushrooms in the composition, but it got nixed, for some reason.)

At any rate, it’s always good to have some permanent features in the garden that establish a sense of place and permanency even when the garden is in its “flat and brown” phase of the annual cycle. Here’s a panorama of the east half of the garden, definitely looking a bit flat and brown. In a few weeks it’ll be raging, though:

Southside Community Garden

Fremont Community Garden (Sacramento, CA)

2010-03-12T02:13:00.001-08:00

Oh, man. It’s been way too long since I’ve posted a new garden here! Can my excuse be that it’s been winter, and the gardens haven’t been looking their most splendid, necessarily?

At any rate, I did get out to some gardens recently, and here’s one of my favorites, the Fremont Community Garden in Sacramento. This garden has an interesting history. Currently there are 50 gardeners growing food and flowers here, but originally the garden was even three times bigger!

It all went down in the early 2000’s. The garden (called the Mandella Community Garden, at the time) had been there “temporarily” since 1960, and finally the city decided to get around to building housing on it. People got pretty upset about this, as you can imagine. There were fruit trees, topsoil, a sense of community, neighborhood involvement—the whole nine yards!

Well, after a series of costly lawsuits and protests (people chaining themselves to trees, etc.) the city development agency finally gave an inch and allowed 1/3 of the garden to stay. They moved the other 2/3 to a noisy lot next to the freeway.

It seems around this time the leftover garden also got a major facelift. They installed ADA accessible pathways (very nice), brick borders and a motley assortment of art installations.

On my tour around the garden, I was impressed by the winter veggies (4-foot fava beans! In March!), the abundance of perennials, and the extra work that some of the gardeners had invested in their plots. Here’s one of the plots that was really going “above and beyond.” Check out those terraces!

This lavender plant was a friendly greeting at the entrance to the garden. It was also abuzz with pollinators! I spied at least one giant bumbler in the flowers. (A visiting entomology class once identified over 20 different kinds of pollinating insects in this garden.)

For a panorama of the entire garden, you can click on the image below. I took four photos and stitched them together with Windows Live Photo Gallery (which happens to be a free download-able program and highly recommended)!

Fremont Community Garden

MLK Middle School Herb Garden (Berkeley, CA)

2010-01-26T12:39:00.001-08:00

It’s worth noting that across from the Edible Schoolyard, there’s another garden right next to the cafeteria, a huge herb garden gifted by local garden organizer Beebo Turman and Eric Weaver.

On this wintery day the herbs most in force were rosemary (so hardy!) lemon balm and rose-scented geranium. All very, very fierce smells. I wonder how the school and students have used these herbs so far. Cooking? Soap-making? Art projects? There seem to be quite a few possibilities.

Good Life Garden (Davis, CA)

2010-01-18T11:18:00.001-08:00

I snapped this picture after a meeting with a professor in one of the adjacent buildings on campus. UC Davis built a bunch of new plant sciences buildings and decided to landscape part of the grounds with an organic demonstration garden. How cool is that?

UC Davis Good Life Garden

Karl Linn Community Garden (Berkeley, CA)

2009-11-25T13:20:00.001-08:00

I didn’t realize it until recently, but this garden is one of the ones that has shaped the entire urban agriculture movement. Karl Linn, a mastermind behind the garden, was one of the preeminent advocates and architects of “neighborhood commons” in the United States.

He championed many of the design approaches to community gardens and urban open space that have gained popularity over the years: reusing materials from the city, building open space by hand with volunteers, integrating urban activities into a single space…All ideas Linn experimented with, embraced and promoted throughout his life.

Here in the gardens named after Mr. Linn, there is a lot to see (and even more history to explore). Garden features include a public water fountain, seating outside the fences, an adjacent demonstration eco-house, another huge community garden across the street, and a link with the Berkeley green belt. (Sorry I don’t have much in the way of pictures. The gates were locked and the light was waning. Maybe next time!)

Karl Linn Garden Commons

My Favorite Community Gardening Internet Resources

2009-11-22T13:09:00.000-08:00

These are all email newsletters and list-serves that I've signed up for and found to be particularly worthwhile:

The list-serve run by the American Community Gardening Association is a golden resource. I also just discovered that it has an archive online, so you can search just about any subject that anyone has asked or answered about community gardening in the last several years. Wow!

A more general forum, the Community Food Security Coalition list serve, is currently on fire with passionate people interested in local and sustainable food systems.

The folks over at City Farmer are also some of the most excellent and experienced gurus of urban agriculture. Somehow they always find the most interesting and ground-breaking news stories on the subject.

Do you have any favorites?

City Slicker Farms (Oakland, CA)

2009-11-19T18:25:00.001-08:00

After reading Novella Carpenter’s book, Farm City, I was excited to visit one of the places she wrote about: City Slicker Farms, located in West Oakland.
Ms. Carpenter raves about this hip urban farm in the middle of the city, and I’d been reading about it other places as well, so I figured, when I saw that they were having a harvest festival, that I better get over there.
There were a ton of people in the garden, milling around, cooking bbq, playing African drums, selling produce and sitting along the sidewalk. I felt a little bit like an interloper, but I wasn’t the only curious outsider. A woman with a video camera (journalism graduate student) and some other students from Berkeley were also there. Somehow this little garden has become a larger concept that draws a lot of outside attention.

As far as I gather, the City Slicker Farms runs this demonstration site, as well as a greenhouse, a produce stand, an apprenticeship system, and a program to help people start their own backyard gardens.
The demonstration garden itself is packed into a tiny space with raised beds, grape vines, a vacant chicken coop (due to a recent raccoon assault), beehives, vertical grow-tubes (interesting), what might be a composting toilet, a dome-shaped shed, and lots of people.

City Slicker Farms lives up to the hype.
City Slicker Farms

Hanging Gardens of Philadelphia

2009-11-18T13:52:00.001-08:00

I love this vertical, little garden in Philadelphia that caught my eye last summer. The potted plants are hanging by chains from the ledge of the roof, with larger planters below. A drip line “rains” water down on the whole thing.

It probably uses a lot of water (??) but it sure maximizes space and creates a cool section along the sidewalk. It was a great section of the street to walk past in the middle of the summer.

more gardens on walls

The Edible Schoolyard (Berkeley, CA)

2009-11-15T15:12:00.001-08:00

Finally, I made it to the Mecca of school gardens: The Edible Schoolyard at Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School in Berkeley, California.

Wow.

I was not disappointed. First of all, the place is Enormous! Much larger than I had imagined—about a third of a city block. Plus, the space feels larger than it might (if it were, say, a soccer field) because there is so much going on. If I were a kid, I could imagine running around and exploring this place for hours.

There is a giant (purple) building to the south of the garden that houses an industrial kitchen, dining area, and offices for the staff. There is a solar-powered waterfall. A greenhouse. A cob tool shed. A poultry palace. A rainwater catchment system. There are water fountains, fruit trees, row crops, arbors with kiwi vines climbing over them, hand-tiled retaining walls, and of course, compost. Totally mind-boggling.

As my friend Maggie said, “These folks have a lot of funding.” Yes, they do, certainly in relation to other school gardens I’ve seen. Then again, this site is designed as a model classroom, and you can tell they are experimenting with anything and everything that can be done with a garden at a middle school. (Interestingly, the garden program is actually a non-profit run next door to the school, but obviously it’s a close partnership.)

I took about a billion photos, but here are some of the highlights from our visit:

A super tall arbor tunnel. I just love how they really went for it. This thing must be at least 12 feet tall!

The fluffiest chicken that I ever did see.

Asparagus fruit in the evening light. Happy Holidays!

The Edible Schoolyard

Public Produce

2009-11-01T23:10:00.001-08:00

I’m excited to read this new book by Darrin Nordahl. It’s about using municipal spaces with total public access to grow food.

Diane Rehm does an interview with the author here.

Dearborn Community Garden (San Francisco, CA)

2009-10-30T12:39:00.001-07:00

I love this little garden in the Mission. It sits in a quiet alley just a block away from bustling Guerrero (and one of the best bakeries in the city). What a lovely oasis.

The outside borders are lined with roses, lavender and other perennials. People obviously care about the place a lot. You can see into the garden from the street, and go inside if there’s someone working there.

The garden also has some huge fences! 10 feet tall with barbed wire (interwoven with spiky canes from the rose bushes and dead palm fronds!). I guess that’s gardening in the gritty city for ya.

Stanford Student Garden (Stanford, CA)

2009-10-17T14:39:00.001-07:00

I stopped by the Stanford Farm yesterday to see what was going on there. A lot, apparently.

The student garden section has taken off like wildfire, mostly thanks to a new, full-time staff member who coordinates gardening and education projects around campus. (Frankly, it sounds like a pretty sweet job.)

She showed me how the student garden has warp-sped into high production mode, supplying food for a weekly farm stand in the middle of campus. (The food is driven across campus in a tiny, electric truck.)

This quarter, 35 students were turned away from the on-site sustainable agriculture class, and there is discussion of moving the student section of the “farm” to a larger, more central location near the equestrian center. (Oh-so-convenient to all that manure, I imagine.)

Wow! Stanford is joining the sustainable food movement in some significant ways.

Santa Cruz Homeless Garden Project (Santa Cruz, CA)

2009-10-12T09:25:00.001-07:00

I visited this cool garden last weekend. We drove down the pacific highway, arrived late in the day, and there was only one person and one dog hanging out there by then. But, the person was totally friendly and the dog was very, very awesome:

He came right up to us with his tail wagging, just the sweetest animal I’ve ever met. One day, I will adopt a dog. One day! Anyway, the garden was great—huge and full of interesting projects (including a hutch full of ducks!!) and lots of flowers. Definitely a garden with a lot going on.

Farm City

2009-09-08T22:24:00.001-07:00

I once told a vegan friend that my ancestors had worked long and hard to develop lactose tolerance, and I would dishonor their names to reject such a gift. Fortunately, my vegan friend has a sense of humor and is very tolerant and forgiving.

I would never defend abusive factory farms, but my love for dairy products is deep, which is partly why I love, love, love the idea of a backyard cow. Some people are getting into this, bringing more farm animals into suburbs and cities. Maybe it’s a fad, maybe it’s a revolution, maybe it will save everyone’s lives when the shiz hits the fan. Whatever, I think it’s cool. I really want to read this book by Novella Carpenter about being a city farmer.

New Community Garden in Golden Gate Park?

2009-08-16T00:43:00.001-07:00

I was in Golden Gate park this afternoon, reveling in perfect San Francisco weather. It’s such a great park.

My sister has an old book on her wall titled Golden Gate: Park of a Thousand Vistas. It’s really true. Every corner you turn, there’s another view, garden, playground, museum, etc.

Hey, I wonder if the park has a community garden…

(quick Google search, type type type…)

Well what do you know!

Youth Garden (National Arboretum, DC)

2008-07-10T21:36:00.000-07:00

One of the easiest community gardens in DC to locate is the Youth Garden at the National Arboretum. Well, it was easy to locate online, but getting there was another story. DC is generally an okay city for taking public transportation, but the Arboretum is located a bit beyond the central grid, towards the Southeast corner of the city. Undaunted, I called the DC public transportation hotline and narrowed down the metro and bus lines that would theoretically get me there.

After a relatively smooth series of transfers, I found myself in a gritty, urban section of town, a few blocks away from my destination. Wandering somewhat confusedly along graffiti-lined sidewalks and past busy intersections, I finally approached a corner store employee and asked her whether she knew how to get to the National Arboretum. She had no clue what I was talking about. Casting my gaze across the street, I spied what looked like several dozen acres of lush forest wedged in among the bustling streets. "Nevermind," I said, "I think I found it."

THE NATIONAL ARBORETUM

Entering the National Arboretum is like crossing through a wardrobe into Narnia. Most people at its doorstep don't even know it exists, but once you pass through the gates, you find yourself in a world of dark green trees, grass, and the chirping of subtropical insects. The sounds of the city are muffled and distant, while a handful of people quietly wander and explore the grounds. Maybe it was just a hot day, or maybe the timing was off, but the place did seem a little...quiet?

Well, I wasn't there to stare at the trees, so I continued into the visitor's center and found my host, the radiant Kaifa Anderson-Hall, the Director of the Washington Youth Garden. She drove me over to the small section of the Arboretum where the Youth Garden had staked out its territory behind a purple gateway.

THE YOUTH GARDEN

The Youth Garden was founded quite a few years ago and is currently affiliated with Friends of the National Arboretum (not the Arboretum itself). The garden does a number of things, including hosting school field trips, teaching local families how to garden, and providing various opportunities for young people.

As far as I can tell, the Youth Garden is the hub of life at the Arboretum. I mean, I'm sure there are lots of other cool things that go on there, but unlike the rest of the place, the Youth Garden was positively buzzing with activity when I got there. Volunteers were weeding around flowering herbs, families were watering their plots, and kids were running in all directions, touching, tasting and exploring every nook and cranny of the garden.

HOW TO SUCCEED WITH VOLUNTEERS

I got to sit down in the shade with Ms. Anderson-Hall for a few minutes and pick her brain for insight into this whole business. One thing that quickly became apparent is that the Youth Garden is an example of success with volunteers. Many of the people volunteering that day had been participating for years, and Ms. Anderson-Hall herself had even started out as a volunteer. (Actually, she had been a young student in the program even before that!)

What brings volunteers together in such a cohesive and vibrant way, year after year? Ms. Anderson-Hall didn't have any miraculous answers for me. She sort of said the same stuff people usually say: volunteer recognition parties, regularly scheduled volunteer sessions, etc. But mostly, people just want to be remembered, appreciated and welcomed when they show up. They want to be part of something they recognize as valuable, and enjoy themselves. (Isn't that what we all want from life?)

It's the kind of atmosphere that requires dedication, and an enthusiastic staff, and maybe even the right alignment of the planets, but sometimes it also just kind of starts to snowball.

So thank you, Youth Garden, for sharing your garden love with a lost stranger who finally found her way off the street to visit you. I'll try to tuck away your lessons about volunteers in a safe place, and pass along your joie de vivre to as many people as I can. To cap things off, here are a few more photos of the garden for your enjoyment!

compost tea!

radishes!

volunteers and students

teaching and learning.

A demonstration of soil types (sand, silt and clay).

Very cool staff members Kaifa and Christopher.